Secrecy and Security News

December 2011

A case for the Guantanamo exemption by Mark J. Prendergast, Stars and Stripes, December 31. "It has been a year now since the Defense Department announced restrictions on Stars and Stripes in the wake of the WikiLeaks affair, the epic breach of national security that this newspaper's reporters and editors and nearly every other American alive had nothing to do with. And yet they and a multitude of other Americans are being forced to pay the price by being told they must cede a measure of the most precious right after life itself -- intellectual freedom."

Science and Censorship: A Duel Lasting Centuries by William J. Broad, New York Times, December 27. "Science and secrecy go back centuries, their conflicting agendas often rooted in issues of war and advanced weaponry. Now the call for concealment is falling on one of the hottest of contemporary fields -- virology, where researchers are tinkering with the fundamentals of life to better understand whether altered flu germs might set off deadly epidemics."

Bradley Manning's WikiLeaks case: The larger issue by Josh Gerstein, Politico, December 23. "The hearing also produced equally compelling evidence of the larger issue that is often overlooked in discussions of Manning's alleged misdeeds: the systematic breakdown in security that enabled a low-ranking enlisted man to abscond with a staggering quantity of classified Pentagon and State Department documents."

Why are we censoring bird flu science? by Jack Shafer, Reuters, December 21. "Even an unenforceable request by the government to suppress the flow of information rankles free-speech radicals like me. We believe in open inquiry and unfettered communications, and battle the redaction machine whenever the censors start its engine."

WikiLeaks' collateral damage by James Kitfield, National Journal, December 16. "Whether you see Manning and Assange as heroic whistleblowers or traitors, however, the argument that they caused no harm is dubious. In fact, the WikiLeaks episode is one of those rare cases from which almost no player has escaped unscathed."

Manning documents reveal security lapses by Shaun Waterman, Washington Times, December 15. "Court documents in the case of an Army intelligence analyst accused of giving classified files to WikiLeaks show a catalog of problems in the Army's handling of classified materials in war zones, especially the use of supposedly secure computer networks."

The Wikileaks Effect by Arun Rath, The World, December 15. "The importance of the source--the individual leaker--is becoming clearer now, as attention shifts from a globe-trotting provocateur to a troubled 24 year old Army private about to face the courtroom in Fort Meade, Maryland."

National Archives works on declassifying massive backlog of documents by Peter Finn, Washington Post, December 3. "To cut through the mountain of paper, the NDC has introduced a risk-management approach to the documents. Instead of attempting to look at every document, all the relevant agencies agreed to look at a small sample of a particular series."